


To Make the Sun Shine

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Porn, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Romance, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:26:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Light never lasts in London, does it?  He, of all people, ought to know better than to believe in something good.</p><p>[Major spoilers for '03/CoS.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Writing the same fic I always write, but _backwards_ , makes it super-creative, right? ~~Almost as creative as the liberties I took by being absolutely shit at research, ahahaha.~~

_How could you be the one if you’re not the same?_  
– “Ghost Lights” – Woodkid –

 

He’s sitting in the window of his cafe—not _his_ by ownership, of course; _his_ by habit alone—when he looks up from the rippling surface of his tea and…

It can’t be possible.

Not by happenstance—not by unlikely coincidence after all the searching.  Not on the street, two sips into a cup of tea, three rescued crumbs into a madeleine—

He’s up from his chair and out the door; the bell jingles, and he cries, “Edward!”

His hands are shaking; the hairs at the nape of his neck are prickling like a cold breath’s passed across his skin.  This is _terribly_ melodramatic, but he can’t help it.  Oh, Lord, for a second eye; for a second _chance_ —

A part of him thought it was more likely that he was wrong.  A part of him thought that, statistically speaking, the number of young men displaced and wandering is more than high enough to guarantee that several of them should have hair the color of goldenrods in Provence.  Mathematically, one of those might well have irises that are not brown, are not green, are not ever unsurprising.  The odds are that it should be someone else.

But they both turn at the sound of his voice—the tall boy with the short brown hair, and… Edward.

Ten years.  Ten years later, he is willowy but _powerful_ ; the lines of his body are graceful and strong; the gold hair trails halfway down his back now, twisting like a ribbon, gleaming in the light.  Ten years later, he is unmistakably the same, undeniably himself, and _unspeakably_ beautiful. 

Ten years later, he is freezing in his tracks like he’s seen a ghost.  A _bad_ ghost; there are no whimsical Dickensian visitors here; there is no warmth to the recognition in those incredible eyes.

At this rate, Ray would rather be a stranger.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I suppose it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” He tries for an apologetic laugh. “Do you remember? Up in Camden, years ago—I was only doing psychiatry then, and your father convinced you to come see me about all of your terribly vivid dreams.”

Edward used to dream about a world with magic, which he could harness using his hands—and they weren’t just any hands; the magic world’s Edward had one arm made of metal, and a leg to match. The projection wore his hair long, which Ray speculated, as tactfully as possible, was a subconscious wish of Edward’s to tap into his anima, into the _feminine_ power of his psyche, to complement the dream boy’s masculine athletic strength.

The unsettling thing about the dreams was not the detail in and of itself, but the logical consistency. They always sounded more like actual anecdotes than they did like the figments and fragments conjured by an unconscious mind. Edward was brilliant—far more than just brilliant; _staggering_ , intimidating, ferociously intelligent and fiercely curious about everything under the sun—but he wasn’t brilliant enough to imagine painstakingly logical fantasy worlds in his sleep.

But there’s no time for that now. It’s too late, and Ray’s done his time thinking back on everything from every angle.

“How is Professor Hohenheim, by the way?” he asks.

Edward draws a breath in sharply and slowly lets it out. “He’s dead.”

Ray wants to say _How? When? Why?_ , but those aren’t questions you ask anymore.

“I’m so sorry,” he says instead.

It doesn’t matter how many—every time an acquaintance vanishes from the face of the planet, he feels the resonation of the loss. There’s a pull from the vacuum; a strain; a _deprivation_. Quicksand. He has to reimagine every Friday morning, rewrite every memory of Hohenheim standing by the window, gently silhouetted by the feeble sunlight leaching through the fog. Every moment where they overlapped is different now—an extinguished existence unravels backwards, ghosting back across every surface that it touched.

It’s strange, really, that anyone can have any past left at all. Half the world is dead; they should all be unwound.

Edward smiles faintly. “Thanks.”

His voice is wrong. His voice is— _wrong_. What’s changed?

“I shouldn’t keep you,” Ray says, and there’s a… _veiled_ … quality to Edward’s bright eyes that makes him hesitate. “It feels like it’s been a lifetime—I didn’t mean to interrupt; I could hardly believe I was seeing you.” He shouldn’t say it, but what if he never gets another chance? “I—looked for you. Afterwards.” _After it was over, and I came home_ , he can’t say, because pieces of him will fight in France as long as he lives. “I couldn’t find a record anywhere; I thought…”

“Ended up in Germany,” Edward says. His voice is a bit tight, a bit hoarse, a bit… cautious. “I mean—eventually. Munich. To study.”

“Ah,” Ray says.

“Rocketry,” Edward says, helplessly. “Look, I’m sorry; if—if I’d known you were trying to find me—us—I… would’ve… reached out, or—something.”

The accent.

Edward is speaking like an American.

“It’s just wonderful you’re all right,” Ray says. The longer he stands here, the worse it feels. There’s a shadow on Edward now. Maybe it’s on all of them; maybe it’s the weight of the sheer emptiness, but it feels like a harrowing pressure on Ray’s chest to see it in a boy who used to be so _light_. “I’ll let you two go back to your business; I’m terribly sorry. It’s good to see you.”

He holds out his hand.

“You, too,” Edward says.

And then the hand that clasps Ray’s is _not_ ordinary—it’s not even flesh, not even skin, no bone, no muscle; it’s _cold_ , and unyielding. It’s… metal. Steel. Incredibly sophisticated, with articulated fingers, with grooves and curves and absolute authenticity.

It’s impossible.

And as the two boys’ backs move away down the pavement, Ray thinks…

_No._

The long yellow ponytail, the cat’s eyes, a _metal_ arm—

_No._

He didn’t look quite as old as he ought to have been; he didn’t know the first thing about their shared history, but he knew Ray’s _face_ —

_No._

But perhaps stranger things have happened. Perhaps he should have learnt to stop asking _anything_ in this world to make sense.

_Perhaps—_

 

 

Sitting down at the same little table, turning an absent gaze through the same broad window, wrapping his hands around another warm cup of the same damn tea—it doesn’t seem like it ever happened.  Maybe it didn’t.  Maybe he’s just nursed this ritual for so long that it’s finally started to crack his mind right down the center.  Maybe the theory is wrong, and repetition isn’t soothing; it’s destructive, like waves wearing boulders down to dust.

 _Wishful thinking_ , is the idiom.  _Projection_ , is the term.

Is he capable of such a staggeringly vivid hallucination?  It’s plausible, isn’t it?  That he would draw some detail from the past and extrapolate it wildly to try to force the fantasy to manifest?

He’s done stranger.  He’s thought worse.  If some of his trench-mud dreams were visible, were broadcast, were inked out on his skin—they’d lock him in a room with padded walls, and the Thames could have the key.

He draws a deep breath, lets it out, and takes a sip of tea. It’s all right. He’s grounded. He’s _functioning_ , at least; all of his systems are in motion, and he’s got one foot planted relatively solidly on the safe side of the precipice. The open air doesn’t own him yet.

As a gesture of good faith, he spreads the newspaper out on the tabletop and makes a concerted effort to care about the rows of stamped-in letters. Liza keeps trying to redirect his attention to the puzzles instead of the world news; mostly likely she thinks it will be healthier. But then, life’s unhealthy—there’s no avoiding it, is there?

Someone slides into the seat beside him.

Ray looks up—goes still.

It’s Edward—that is, not-Edward. Not-quite. Not-in-the-slightest; not-at-all.

“Hey,” Edward says. “Sorry. It’s just… Al figured you’d be here—‘clearly such a creature of habit nuns are green with envy’ is what he said, actually; he’s such a _smartass_ sometimes—and he said I should come by. He said it’d be good for closure.” He pushes his hair back from his face with his left hand and smiles ruefully. “To be honest, I dunno who the closure’s supposed to be for.”

Oh, Lord. This is the moment of truth.

“Al,” Ray says slowly. He watches out of the corner of his eye, tries to see _everything_ , which is much harder now than it was back when he had two eyes to work with. “Is that your—friend?”

None of the teashop employees are looking at him like he’s gone mad and started talking to thin air.

Oh, _Lord_. He was half-hoping he was starkers. It might very well be easier than this.

“My brother,” Edward is saying, with an odd, fiercely warm sort of light to his eyes. “He’s the b—”

“You’re real,” Ray says, somewhat faintly. “You exist.”

Edward stares at him for a moment, and then he looks down at his gloved right hand and curls it into a fist on the tabletop.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “Don’t seem to be able to stop—not for lack of trying. Occasionally I even think I deserve to keep at it.”

“I’m sorry,” Ray says. “That’s not what I meant. It’s only that—you were someone else’s dream.”

“About that.” Edward folds his hands now, and—surely it’s medically and mechanically impossible, for metal things to be so intricate and so precise. It can’t be anything from this world, can it? It simply _cannot_ , and when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable… “You—knew the other… Edward?”

“He was my patient,” Ray says. “Before the War.” It’s always a capital letter, in his head. It’s always three letters and a deluge of glass-shard memories and mortar-bursts of pain.

Those same eyes on him, angled, suspicious. “Patient in what? You keep saying ‘dreams’.”

“I was a psychiatrist,” Ray says, turning the teacup. Handle towards his chest; handle away. “Somewhat inadvertently I ended up specializing in dreams and the subconscious. Yours—well, Edward’s, that Edward’s—were extraordinary. I had hypotheses about them.”

“Did you,” Edward says, fingers knitting tight.

“None like this,” Ray says.

“Yeah.” Edward smiles, thinly. “Blew my mind the first time I wound up here.”

“I can imagine,” Ray says. If this is merely an extension of a day-old phantasmagoria—if _he’s_ dreaming, if it’s all a terrible capricious game put on by his wracked and shaken brain—well, there’s no real harm in playing along. “How did you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Edward blinks at him; the flash of a grin is like a signal flare in darkness—too bright, and only a glimmer of the story told. “Jesus. You’re _polite_. Wasn’t expecting that.” The last of the smile fades. “Eh. It’s a long story. Stupid story. Dunno if you’d believe it. Did Edward ever tell you about alchemy?”

“As much as he could,” Ray says. “Even between the two of us, I don’t think we could have hoped to understand it from the outside, peering in. On the best nights, his dreams were still… indistinct. We had to piece them back together before we could even speculate.”

Edward looks at the tabletop for a long moment. He rubs at a nick in the wood with his fingertip, over and over.

“You really…” He clears his throat. “You really—cared about that kid.”

“I did,” Ray says. It does not escape him that this Edward refers to the other Edward (to _his_ Edward; but he mustn’t even think it—) exclusively in the past tense. “We spent a lot of time together, and he shared a great deal of himself with me.”

Edward fidgets with his gloves and then folds his hands in his lap, only then to press them together between his knees and draw his legs in until there’s no more space for them to move. “What happened?”

“I had a bit of medical training,” Ray says. “It wasn’t the primary focus of my degree, but it was more than most people have. Men younger than I were dying in droves, so I enlisted to be a medic.”

“Oh,” Edward says. “Oh, _shit_.”

“That sums it up rather succinctly, to tell the truth,” Ray says.

Edward shakes his head—an acknowledgment, not a denial. His hair flutters, and his eyelashes dip, and he is distressingly beautiful in the pale morning light. “It’s… okay, it’s not _funny_ , but I used to know someone… like you. Soldier, too. Only when he was on the front lines, he wasn’t saving people; he was a killing machine.”

Ray almost wants to say _I lacked what I would classify as machinelike efficiency when it came to that_ , but you don’t talk about scrabbling and slipping in the mud, trying to jam a bayonet blade into a German boy’s throat, in the middle of a coffee shop.

He could swear he sees it, though—the pulse of empathy. Has Edward killed before? Lord. Life is making monsters of them all.

“I did what I could,” he says instead.

Edward leans his torso in towards the table, and his half-laced boots hike up onto the rung of his chair. He never stops _moving_ , does he? “So, um… what are you up to now?”

“It’s something of a combination practice,” Ray says. “Psychiatry and physiology united, I suppose. Most of my patients are veterans. I think there’s a lot more to say about shell shock than anyone is willing to discuss.”

Edward swallows twice, opens his mouth, closes it, swallows again, and looks intently at the table. “How weird are you willing to get?” he asks.

“I beg your pardon?” Ray says.

“Al says sometimes that I should see a shrink,” Edward says, eyes tracking past a crumpled napkin and up to the glare of light on the window. “Maybe it should be you.”

“You should see a _therapist_ ,” Ray says. “Not a shrink. I’m afraid you don’t need any shrinking.”

Edward stares at him for a long moment, open-mouthed for the duration this time. Then his eyes—fill, _flood_ ; then he’s shoving his chair back right as the waiter approaches, darting past an entering patron, blasting out the door—

“I’m so sorry,” Ray says, fighting out his pocketbook, fumbling for the coins— “You’ll have to forgive him; he’s been through a lot—” That’s half again the cost, but to _hell_ with it; he slaps the money down on the tabletop and hastens for the door— “Cheers, so sorry; until tomorrow, then—?”

He takes off running, and it’s not _fair_ , really, that every muscle of his body should be so tight with terror, that his heart should be pounding so hard. He doesn’t know Edward—not this Edward. He wouldn’t even know the other one, the _real_ one, after ten damn years of the whole world suffering at once.

But he doesn’t have to run far. Edward’s just around the corner, a few steps into the alley, leaning against the wall of the building and making a truly horrendous sound of sobbing laughter into his hands.

“Edward,” Ray says softly, and he reaches out slowly—no sudden movements, no startlement—to touch the left forearm, just lightly.

Edward flinches away, or as far _away_ as he can go against a brick wall. Ray shifts more towards Edward’s left side, further from the street; it’s best to give him an avenue to escape, best not to corner him here.

“It wasn’t a guy _l-like_ you,” Edward chokes out, breaths rattling, his mouth half-grimace and half-grin. “He _was_ you—the you on my s-s-side, just like you h-had your Ed here. He always used to d-do that—call me sh-short, only _underhanded_ , puns and sh-shit; he’d never just s-s-say it.” He draws a deep, albeit quavering, breath and scrubs the back of his left hand across his eyes. “Only not the last time. He knew it was, too. I ribbed him and shit, and he let it go. Al thinks—I dunno. It doesn’t matter; it’s too late. And I didn’t have the fucking guts to say goodbye, because that would’ve made it _real_ , and I thought I was losing Al, too; I couldn’t face the thought…” He lowers his arms and flattens both palms on the wall behind him. With the fingers of the left, he picks at the protruding corner of a brick. “Your Edward’s dead,” he says, tilting his head back until Ray actually checks to see if the dull gray of the sky has changed. “’S my fault. Usually is. The fucking bombings. But I don’t think he felt it; I felt it. S’fucking horrible. But killing’s worse. Dying’s sort of—quiet. Killing someone, you get this _hurricane_ in your head.”

There’s currently a void in Ray’s. Words. There must be words somewhere. There must be words and gestures and expressions he can offer to this red-eyed, wet-faced young man with a tempest inside of him.

“Can you come in Friday morning?” he asks, gently. He notices that his own hands are hovering halfway to Edward’s shoulders and lowers them slowly. “No charge. We’ll just—do a consulting, shall we? See how it goes?”

Liza’s going to kill him. The books are enough of a trial to balance as it is; they can’t afford to give out charity.

Edward smiles at him, lopsidedly. “S-sure. Friday’s fine. I teach on Thursdays. Where’s your place?”

“I have a card,” Ray says, and of course his pockets hide them all as he starts patting about. “It’s just a little ways up Brick Lane. Ten on Friday? Eleven?”

“Split the difference,” Edward says. “Ten-thirty.”

Blessedly, Ray’s fingers light on cardstock delving into the pocket in his waistcoat. Why did he even put a card there? “Here—you’ll want to hop off at Aldgate East and head to your right on Whitechapel. Osborn turns into Brick Lane before too long, and it’s on the right.”

Edward takes the card with his left hand and studies it with an absolute focus that is rare and—remarkable.

Liza is _definitely_ going to kill him.

“All right,” Edward says. “Ten-thirty. If Al doesn’t bury me first.” He glances up. “Kidding. I’m just in for a lot of significant looks, is all.” He tucks the card into his trouser pocket and pushes his hand in after it. “Hey, um… thank you. By the way. For… yeah.”

“Certainly,” Ray says. “I’ll see you Friday, then.”

“Right,” Edward says, and then he hesitates, and then he makes fine use of that street-side egress Ray left.

Liza is going to chop Ray into pieces small enough to scatter to the wind.

 

 

“Breathe in,” Ray says. Kain obliges, but he’s slouching like a chastened child. “Sit up a bit straighter?”

“Sir,” Kain says, snapping to attention, and then he blinks owlishly. His eyes look naked when the spectacles are pushed up into his hair. “…oh. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, not at all,” Ray says softly. “Just breathe deeply. That’s right.”

He gives Kain’s heart a few more _thumps_ to impress him, but the rhythm’s stable.

“Sounds good,” he says, setting the stethoscope aside and taking up his well-abused clipboard instead. “Anything feel off? Toothache, backache…?”

“Headaches again,” Kain says, rubbing at the side of his neck. He looks tiny on the patient table, but he always has to be specifically instructed to climb down and put his shirt back on and sit in the armchair; he _pays_ for these sessions and still hates to impose. “I think it’s this new radio job—I’m so worried it’ll fall through that I just…” He makes a helpless face and hunches his shoulders to demonstrate.

“If they’ve any brains in their heads at all,” Ray says, jotting it down, “they’ll chain you to a chair in there so they can keep you forever.” He moves over towards the armchairs and attempts to look uncritically expectant. “How have the dreams been this week?”

Kain, bless him, takes the hint and slides down, collecting his clothing as he goes. “About the same. I had the one where I was a bloodhound again, but this time I caught him, and I hamstrung him with my teeth.” Kain’s superiors were not sympathetic to his delicate psychological state. Most of them died in Belgium, but they usually die again at Kain’s hands while he sleeps. “Not sure that’s actually possible; I’m not sure how much force a dog’s jaw…”

Ray twirls his pencil. “How did it feel? Catching him. Digging in like that.”

Kain sighs as he drops into the chair across from Ray. “Satisfying. But even at the time, I thought… a part of me thought, _This isn’t fair; he doesn’t deserve this for how he was to me_. It was vicious, too—visceral, very… lots of blood, lots of shreds of him. I woke up not too long after I brought him down, but he was screaming, begging, you know; lots of… his voice kept going hoarse; when I first sat up, I thought, _That’s really strange, that I’d imagine that so realistically_ , but mostly I just felt… tired. Resigned, I think. Part of me didn’t want to hurt him, but the part that was already moving was too powerful to stop.”

“Let’s go back a bit,” Ray says. “He didn’t deserve it?”

Kain gives him a shaky smile. “To be mutilated and devoured by a dog version of one of his soldiers? Can’t say I’d wish that on anyone.”

“The particulars are morbid,” Ray says, all hail the understatement; “but I think the concept… At the time, he was destroying _you_ , and you couldn’t fight back. This time, you’re on the attack. He’s the one running scared.”

Kain is quiet for a moment. “I… suppose.”

“Did you resent him, while it was happening?” Ray asks. “Did you feel that _strongly_ , but you were… leashed? Muzzled? You were restrained, because he was a superior officer, and you wanted to obey orders, but you also wanted to _make_ him understand?”

Kain shifts in the chair, toying with the yet-untucked hem of his shirt. “I don’t—remember. Maybe. Yes.”

“Try to remember,” Ray says gently. “Try to remember how it was _then_.”

“He kept on saying I was a coward,” Kain says, fingertips skating up and down the arm of the chair. “He’d say I should snap out of it; I was just too weak, or… unfocused. Unmanly. I’ve forgotten half of his phrases; they started to… roll off… after a while. It was getting harder and harder to think back then, in any case; I barely heard him sometimes. I used to think—what if there _wasn’t_ something wrong with me? What if ordinary people felt like this, too, all the time, every day, and each morning they just _got up_ and went about their business? And if they did, then it was only my weakness after all. I was so scared I’d find out it was. But sometimes I remembered—being _here_ , being home, before. Being all right. Sometimes I could think very rationally about how I hadn’t always felt so numb and _wild_ at turns, and then I’d think… I ought to see if somebody could set me right again.”

Ray’s scribbling madly to keep up. “That’s good. That’s excellent, Kain. But it wasn’t just you, was it?”

“No.” A faint smile. “I almost cried, when I stepped into Craiglockhart—with relief, I mean. Because I wasn’t _alone_.”

“That,” Ray says. “Remember that.” He turns a page, smoothes it. “Any other violent episodes?”

“Not anywhere outside of dreaming,” Kain says. “The… anxiety’s getting worse, though, I think. At the radio job. I think it’s just because… I want to do so _well_ , and I’m on edge waiting for something to go wrong. I have this awful feeling like I’m going to ruin it, and there’s nothing I can do. This—impending… doom. Dread. Inevitability. Do you know that one?”

“I do,” Ray says. “Quite well.”

 

 

He files his notes once Kain goes—shirt still untucked, hat in hand, but looking a little more alive. There’s a brisk knock on the open door. “Doctor?”

Impending doom has ceased to pend: Liza only ever calls him _Doctor_ when she’s angry.

“Yes?” he asks, as innocently as he’s capable of.

“Why do you have an unlabeled hour marked out on your calendar on Friday morning?”

He considers the phrasing, but quickly; to hesitate is to admit to guilt. “There’s someone I need to see.”

“Doctor,” Liza says, slower and with even more of her patented _You are a record-setting imbecile_ tone, “I’m going to have to sign this individual in. Playing at keeping a secret is a tremendous waste of both of our time.”

Ray’s collar itches. He looks out the window, down towards the street; imagines the worn boots; imagines one foot metal and one foot warm.

“Did I ever tell you about Edward?” he asks.

Silence. To dumbfound Liza is something of an art form.

“I don’t believe so,” she says eventually. “Someone from before, or after?”

Everything in their personal timelines is defined like _B.C._ and _A.D._ , the ancient and the new—before the War touched them; and after, when they were owned, and found, and so far gone.

Liza’s grandfather had been close to a man close to Churchill; she’d begged for a chance to demonstrate how she could shoot. They sent her to Arras. She ended up on Ray’s table with a bullet in her side, and once he’d removed it, she never left his.

“He was a patient before I left,” Ray says.  The echo in his head, of the same voice—lower, coarser, older, but the _same_. The words he can’t quite silence— _Your Edward’s dead_.  “He’s… a different person now, you might say.  I saw him in the street the other morning and thought I was losing my mind once and for all.”

Liza looks at him for a long moment and then lowers her gaze to the schedule log in her hands, making a swift notation.  “But how would we tell the difference?”

“I walked into that,” Ray says.

“You marched,” Liza says.  “With great fanfare.  Heymans’s appointment started two minutes ago, so we might just see him within the hour.  Shall I hound him for his payment, or would you like to do the honors?”

“I know how much you enjoy making meaningful gestures with the letter opener,” Ray says.

Liza smiles, thinly but genuinely, which is one of life’s small and invaluable victories.

 

 

Friday.  Ten-twenty-five.  He’s not coming, is he?

Ten-twenty-eight.  He’s not coming.

Ten-thirty.

Ten-thirty-two.

Ten-thirty-three.

Ray scrubs a hand down his face; he avoids the patch on instinct now.  Edward is just some _boy_ —some other-world’s mirror-image of his. Well, presuming that he’s not a raving lunatic who _thinks_ he can perform alchemy, and has used some sort of psychotic genius to construct himself a mechanical arm to suit the story.

The problem is that magic is more plausible.

Ray’s head hurts.

Ten-thirty-five.

What a miserable _fool_ he is, to hang his hopes on less than half a chance—to bank on pennies, to try rappelling with a length of thread. What is it about him that’s drawn to emotional self-destruction? Does he think he deserves it? Is this some sad, sad variation on survivor’s guilt? _I may have lived, but at least I’m incapable of being happy_. Well, fine. Lovely. That’s a class act.

He grinds a knuckle into his eye, blinks hard, and hunkers down to focus on which snippets of Sigmund he should quote to Heymans next week.

The door opens downstairs.

“Oh,” the voice says. “ _Oh_. Um—hi. Good morning. I’ve… got an appointment.”

“Good morning,” Liza says, placidly for someone who’s almost certainly attempting to bore through Edward’s skin with the force of her gaze. “What’s your name?”

“Ed Elric. Should be ten-thirty. I mean—he said it was okay. I could come back another time if it’s not.”

“No, you’re listed here,” Liza says. “He’s expecting you. Let me walk you up?”

Lord have mercy.

“Sure,” Edward says, faintly audible over the deliberate scrape of the chair. “Thanks.”

As predicted, Liza gives Ray a look that could melt bone as she holds the door for… Edward. Not-Edward. The miracle.

“Give me a shout if you need anything,” Liza says.

“Thank you,” Ray says.

Edward sidles in, and Liza’s gaze makes Ray’s stomach lining peel and curl like old wallpaper, and then the door swings shut.

“Hey,” Edward says. He lingers by the doorway; Ray’s nearly sitting on the windowsill.

“Good morning,” he says.

“Sorry I’m late,” Edward says. “Somebody told me I should go by the church instead, and I got turned around.”

“That’s quite all right,” Ray says.

“So,” Edward says.  “Raymond.  Raymond Mustang.”

Ray blinks.  He’d been trying to busy his hands with the clipboard; trying not to think too much; this was a _terrible_ idea; why wasn’t he thinking too much _then_ , when he suggested it?  “…yes?”

“It’s just that m—the—guy I knew, he was… Roy.”  Edward smiles slightly, gesturing unhelpfully towards his own face.  “Same eye, though.  Weird how some things diverged and some didn’t.  And his patch was this big, honkin’, dramatic-ass thing, ’cause he’s—he _was_ —just—like that.”

“Were you drawn to the drama?” Ray says.

Edward grins, wolfishly, and that is a _dangerous_ expression if Ray’s ever seen one, with any number of eyes.  “Boy.  You don’t waste time.”

“Time is money, isn’t it?” Ray asks.  “Your money, in this case.”

Edward’s grin curves like a cutlass.  “Thought I was getting in for free.”

“Just this once,” Ray says.

“All right,” Edward says.  “Then I owe you one favor back.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Ray says.

“It’s equivalent,” Edward says, and there are shards of broken promises in that smile.

Ray’s going to have to delve into that, isn’t he?

“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing to the table.

Edward swings himself up onto it so smoothly that he barely crinkles the paper—he’s accustomed to this. He’s used to hiking his weight up onto awkward surfaces to be examined. There’s an amused sort of resignation to the cant of his shoulders; the way he swings his legs; the way he arches an eyebrow and tilts his head slowly to the side.

“Shall we start with the basic vitals?” Ray asks.

“I can tell you now,” Edward says, “that I’m definitely alive.” He reaches for the buttons of his waistcoat all the same, only then to pause just as his fingers begin to curl. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“As long as you are,” Ray says, despite the temptation to wring his hands and wail, _Ready for_ what _?_

Edward draws a breath, lets it out slowly, squares his shoulders, peels off his gloves, and deftly unfastens all of the buttons of the waistcoat, immediately followed by all of the buttons on his shirt. There’s a sliver of pale flesh and an angry gleam of scar tissue, and then he’s shrugging off both articles as one.

Ray is—speechless.

And numb, and paralyzed—his hands clench around the clipboard, which is a godsend, since only that instinct stops him dropping the whole thing to the floor.

He can still think—but only barely, and the entirety of his brain is consumed with wonder. There are no gears. There are no pistons. There is no steam; there is no fuel; there is no power source. It is not electric. It is not motorized. It is not… _possible_.

Edward drums his metal fingertips on the edge of the table—the sound that results is an almost-musical _ping_ ing. The whole false limb shifts so _subtly_ as he moves; every piece is perfectly aligned, and the caliber of functionality—the _versatility_ —the capability and the sheer _finesse_ —

“I apologize,” Ray says, sounding weak to his own ears. “I don’t believe I was ready after all.”

Edward smiles thinly. “If I had a couple quid for every time I heard that, I could buy enough chocolate not to give a shit anymore.” He leans down and rolls up the bottom of his left trouser leg—more incredibly intricate steel. “I’ve got lots of souvenirs,” he says. He sits back and presses a fingertip down midway along his thigh. “Goes up to here, by the way, so you might wanna try the reflex test on the other one.”

“This world of yours,” Ray says through the vertiginous spinning of his own head. “Is this ordinary there?”

“Yes and no,” Edward says. The line of his shoulders loosens—just a fraction, but it counts. “Automail’s… I mean, it’s not _common_ , but it’s normal. Mine’s the best, though, ’cause my mechanic was the best. This stuff’s so durable you wouldn’t believe it, and she had to _guess_ the proportions after not seeing me for two years. Pretty damn brilliant if you ask me.”

“That’s extraordinary,” Ray says. He edges closer, sets the clipboard down, angles his hand in a way that’s meant to be imploring. “May I—?”

“Sure, yeah,” Edward says, but Ray doesn’t miss the half-second’s hesitation before he holds out the metal arm.

Ray takes it gently in both hands, not trusting himself to speak, hardly trusting himself to _believe_. It’s plated down from the shoulder; there are bare wires underneath—the elbow joint is a marvel in and of itself; to have so _much_ inconceivable magnificence in one place—

Ray runs his fingertips very slowly up the grooves of the forearm, and then back down. There are nicks and scratches everywhere in the steel, some of them so jagged he has to wonder what was _done_ with this construction.

And the hand. Its proportions are nearly identical to the left one; that a mass of metal, interconnected, could be so _powerful_ —Ray thinks his heart may just leap out of his chest and land in the curve of those fingers.

( _Would it be so bad?_ the part of him he tried to outrun asks softly. It hounded him in foxholes; it wriggled through him when the shell casings showered down. They say there are no atheists on battlefields; Ray’s not sure of that, but he suspects there are no liars. He’s been running since he came back—no more echoes of his own voice against the dripping walls of trenches—but here he stands, half-bent towards metal miracles, and it’s caught him at last. _Would it really be so awful? Would they make so poor a cage? You’ve craved a cradle for that heart since the moment you recognized your own mortality. Why not this one? Why not now?_ )

“Amazing,” Ray says. “This is amazing.”

“It doesn’t freak you out?” Edward asks slowly, and it doesn’t escape Ray’s notice that the boy’s eyes are intently watching his face.

“Not especially,” Ray says. “It does baffle me quite a bit. How are you operating it? I’ve never seen a prosthetic that _responds_.”

“That’s automail for ya,” Edward says. He extends his fingers fully and wriggles them; the tips brush Ray’s wrist. “I never paid too much attention to the details, but it’s wired to my nerves. I actually have trouble moving it if I think about it too much, but if I just pretend it’s a normal arm, it receives and interprets all the same impulses from my brain.”

“This could change the world,” Ray says as he lowers his own hands to let go.

Edward shrugs—with the metal shoulder, of course. Just to obliterate another small portion of Ray’s brain. “Change, yeah. Save, no. I mean, you lot’ve got all kinds of things my world didn’t have.” He looks towards the window, clenching both hands around the edge of the examining table. “I’d trade the automail back for alchemy in a second, anyway. It’s not… I mean, sound body is great, but alchemy was kind of… my soul. A lot of it, anyway. And I’m okay; I’m coping, sure—I’m about a billion times better with Al here—but it’s like… it’s like if you were an artist, and you woke up one morning, and you couldn’t draw. Not that you didn’t want to; not that you didn’t remember how—you just _couldn’t_. The capacity was gone.” He sighs and tosses his head, flinging his hair out of his face. “Plus the automail’s a bitch to maintain sometimes—everybody always asks what smells like machine oil, for starters; and in winter I get these aches and chills, and in summer it swells until I want to chop it off.”

“Oh,” Ray says.

Edward grins, weary but genuine. “Yeah. ‘Oh’.”

“I think I’m missing a great deal of the story,” Ray says, taking up the stethoscope and trying not to think too much about the contours of Edward’s uncovered body. “Perhaps I can convince you to tell me most of it. First I’ll need you to sit up straight and breathe deeply, however, if you don’t mind…?”

“Sure thing, Doc,” Edward says.

He’s not sitting straight, though—not quite. Ray logs that mentally as he counts the beats and watches the secondhand on his wristwatch.

“I’m going to need your blood pressure, too,” he says as he jots the tally down—it’s a bit faster than he expected, given Edward’s size. Could that be related to the metal limbs somehow? But oughtn’t his heart beat _slower_ , then, since there’s less blood to move, and less cumulative distance for it to travel? “All the basics, so that over time we have data for comparison.”

“You seem pretty confident that I’m coming back,” Edward says, offering his left arm for the cuff.

“I live in hope,” Ray says, and tucks the disc of the stethoscope in beneath the cuff’s edge. “Bear with me.”

Edward watches in what Ray can already tell is uncharacteristic quietude.

Silence—sound—silence.

“You’re a bit high,” Ray says as he unwinds everything and jots the numbers down. “Not enough that I’d be concerned, but it’s worth noting.” He pauses. “Would you mind hopping down for a moment and taking off your shoes?”

Edward obliges. “Can’t get over you _asking_ instead of _ordering_.”

Ray pauses again. “Is this to do with the other…”

“The other you?” Edward asks. He picks at the laces of his boots and toes them off. Without them, Ray can clearly see that Edward’s default is to put his weight on the balls of his feet—it’s a fighting stance. “Yeah. He was my superior officer.” He wrinkles his nose at Ray’s expression. “I joined the military when I was twelve. I had a good reason. Namely, uh, needing the resources. And the cash. It was a good reason at the _time_.”

“I see,” Ray says. He doesn’t, of course, but it’s polite. “Will you… bend over forward for me? As far as you can. Keep your back straight, and put your palms together, if you would.”

He knew this would not be especially kind to either of them, but he did not anticipate just how _difficult_ it would be to resist the impulse to run his hands over the curve of Edward’s _extremely_ shapely rear.

And, for his part, Edward makes a faint sound—some amalgam of pain and frustration as he tries to shift his shoulders to make his arms hang evenly.

“That’s fine,” Ray says, gently, reining himself in; he doesn’t have a _choice_. “Just stay right there for me.”

“Well, I’m not doin’ it for _me_ ,” Edward mutters.

Ray swallows. It’s obvious; it’s _agonizingly_ obvious. There’s no need whatsoever to reach out and lay his fingertips on either side of Edward’s spine and trace its terrible curve all the way from the wispy pale gold hairs at the nape of his neck down to the waist of his trousers.

And Ray does it anyway. Because hell might just be worth it, now.

Edward has beautiful skin and beautiful bones and is so misaligned that Ray’s back throbs at the sight of it.

“How heavy is the arm?” Ray asks.

He’s still standing behind a bent-double Edward Elric—expanses of bare flesh, the ripple of his ribs beneath his skin, the fall of hair, the positively exquisite ass, the vulnerability and its implication of _trust_ —

“Dunno exactly,” Edward says. “Heavy. Why? ’S my back all fucked up?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Ray says. “The doctor’s version is that you have fairly severe scoliosis.”

“Shit,” Edward says. He straightens slowly; Ray backs away. He stretches, both hands braced on his hips—and, contorted spine or no, arching his back like that… Ray’s pulse is slamming in his throat and his ears and everywhere. “Figures. I think Winry mentioned something about that, y’know, early on, but… well.” He lifts his hands and smiles at them, wryly. “This was supposed to be temporary.”

Ray stays out of reach, for both of their safety, and gestures grandly to the armchairs. “I think there’s a lot more of this story to tell.”

Edward slides smoothly back into his clothes, and Ray is torn between missing the intimacy and admiring the show.

“Maybe,” Edward says. “Can’t start from the start, though. We’re gonna have to work up to that.” He collapses into the armchair sideways, legs splayed over the side. “Uh, let’s see… well, when we crashed back into Munich—me and Al, I mean—my only friend had been shot dead trying to help me do right by people in another universe, and I’d never even gotten to tell him I was coming back. I never even said goodbye.” He runs the left hand through his hair. “Jesus, I _never_ do. There’s never time, or I don’t _know_ , or… Maybe Al’s on to something about closure.”

“When you say ‘never’,” Ray says, smoothing down a blank sheet of paper on his clipboard, “how many experiences of loss does that entail?”

Edward sighs, tilting his head back; the ponytail slithers down over the arm of the chair. “Shit. I am gonna have to start from where it started.” He swallows, and his eyes slant sideways towards Ray, and then he clears his throat. “My… father… left. When I was really small; Al was just a baby. And he had his reasons, I guess, and not all of them were even _shitty_ reasons, in the end, but—I didn’t even really understand. I just saw what it did to our mom. And then…” He draws his right knee up against his chest and hooks his arm around it. The flexibility is remarkable, and the fidgeting is like a poker tell. “She… died. There was nothing we could _do_ ; we were just _kids_ , but… Shit. This is so weird; I don’t…”

“You’re doing very well,” Ray says softly.

Edward spares him a dubious look before he returns to frowning at the open air. “The thing… is… there’s stuff you’re not supposed to do, with alchemy. Stuff that’s off-limits— _taboo_ , y’know. But smart kids… there’s this special kind of arrogance kids have, and _smart_ kids—they just think the whole world’s at their fingertips for free.” He licks his lips. “Only it’s not free. See, we figured—we thought the reason it was forbidden was that nobody else was _good_ enough to do it _right_.” Molten eyes, wormwood smile. “That’s not why.” He strikes his metal hand against his metal knee, and the steel rings. “ _This_ is why.”

“You thought you were going to get your mother back?” Ray asks slowly.

Edward’s metal fingertips drag along a seam of the chairback. “Instead we killed her twice.” His eyes widen, slightly, and his breathing quickens at an alarming rate. “Oh, holy _shit_. There was—there was this girl, this little girl we couldn’t… and then _Hughes_. And then—oh, _God_ —” He covers his face with both hands; his shoulders tremble. “—Greed—and then the _others_ —and— _her_ —and—” His arms cross over his knees, and he buries his face in them. “And Al said Teacher’s dead, and I _saw_ my dad die—after all that, the fucking _bastard_ had to go and… and _Alfons_ , and I just… it just doesn’t ever fucking _stop_ , does it?”

“I’m afraid not,” Ray says.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Edward mutters, raking his left hand through his hair. “Let’s… not… start there. Once I get going, I just keep thinkin’ of more, and…” He straightens up in the chair and takes several deep breaths. Ray sits very still. “Anyway, so… Al’n I… crashed back into Munich, and Alfons was already gone. We figured… why not see what else was out there, right? Since we had nothing really anchoring us in Germany anymore. So we tagged along with our Romani friend and just… went with it. We just _went_. And it was really great for a while, but eventually we started to get… tired. Tired of being hungry, and cold, and getting glared at by the cops. Tired of not being able to afford new shoes and shit. So we said goodbye—that time I _did_ , see—and wandered back over this way and… here we are.”

“You said that you teach?” Ray asks.

“Physics and chemistry,” Edward says, calmly, without so much as a modicum of pride. “Aerospace engineering stuff, too, when they’ll let me—that was what Alfons did, so it’s like… holding onto him, I don’t know. Anyway, I had a couple old recommendation letters I was hanging onto, and once I got my foot in the door, in interviews I would just start writing out equations and shit and explaining things the faculty didn’t really understand, and UCL offered to make me a lecturer, and then they said they’d take Al, too, so… that’s what we do.”

“Do you enjoy it?” Ray asks.

“Indoctrinating a bunch of snot-nosed little shits who don’t understand the value of critical thinking?” Edward asks, grinning.  “S’all right.  There are enough of ’em, you know, who remind me why I love science, ’cause you see how their eyes light up when they just _get_ it.  That’s what you have to aim for.  And sometimes I can buy a bunch of cake and bribe Al into helping me mark the exams.”

“Doesn’t he have his own?” Ray asks, this time out of most-likely-misplaced curiosity.

“Yeah,” Edward says. “But I can usually talk him into it, because he knows I’ll just pass ’em all indiscriminately if I get too sick of the whole thing or run out of time. Anyway, it’s… fine. Hard science is okay, I guess. Numbers and stuff.”

“Rather than—alchemy?” Ray asks.

“Yeah,” Edward says again. He starts to say more, and then he hesitates, metal fist clenching and unclenching slowly where it perches on the armrest of his chair. He swallows, looking out the window intently. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course you can,” Ray says. “That’s exactly why we’re here.”

“Alchemy,” Edward says slowly. “It’s… different. It’s got a hell of a lot of chemistry in it, obviously, because you have to be able to identify component parts pretty much on sight; and it’s got a lot of physics and engineering and stuff, too, because you have to understand how things _work_ in order to put them back together right. But it’s… more than that. More than them. Alchemy has a part of _you_ in it, in a way no regular equations-on-paper science does. If your equation works, it works; but even a perfect array can go haywire in the wrong hands. And I was…” He smiles slightly. “Well, hell, I was damned _good_ at it. No one would ever argue with that. It kind of completed me, I guess—made me feel useful, and helpful, and whole, and… and maybe you’d say it was a crutch, and Al and I did kind of bury ourselves in it, y’know, trying to look forward, trying to believe in something, but… this world’s sciences are _cold_. Alchemy you could love. And I gave it up to get here.”

Ray doesn’t dare to twitch his pen. “Do you regret that?”

“No,” Edward says, calm and immediate. “I did it for the right reason. And then I got Al back in the bargain. It was gonna be for him in the first place, really—to keep him safe.” He lifts his right arm and spreads the fingers. “This was for him, too. Al always comes first, and I never look back. That’s not even a question. It’s just… a fact. You regret decisions; you can’t regret a _fact_.”

“Do you regret settling here?” Ray asks.

Edward’s eyes fix on him for a moment, and then their focus slides sideways to the window again. “Sometimes. London’s… grimy, y’know. Busy. Full. Loud. But it’s weird, ’cause all you have to do is walk a block or two away from a main road, and then that changes, and it’s these quiet houses and little gardens and churches and stuff. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s kind of exciting, and sometimes it’s so claustrophobic I want to scream.” He scratches under the band of his ponytail with a fingernail, making a face as he does. “It’s okay. Al and I do okay. Al’s happy. That’s all that matters.”

“How about you?” Ray asks softly.

“I’m fine,” Edward says. “I stay occupied. That’s the trick, you know; you keep your hands moving and your brain full, and you don’t have much time to think about the things you want, or miss, or… whatever.”

“Is that enough for you?” Ray asks.

Edward grins humorlessly. “Do I have a choice?”

“There’s always a choice,” Ray says.

The grin tilts a little. It’s starting to look ever so slightly deranged. “You think I could _choose_ to be happy?”

Ray resists the urge to write _Mayday_ in large letters on his page of notes. “That isn’t what I said. I meant that there is always an option to accept the status quo, or to change the situation. If you feel that you’re settling for a life which is not ‘enough’, there _are_ going to be opportunities to alter it. Taking those opportunities likely would not be easy, but they certainly exist.”

Edward fishes his gloves out of his waistcoat pocket and puts them on. He tugs them carefully into place, adjusting all the seams. Only when he’s fussed with them for almost a minute does he speak.

“I told you,” he says. “I’m fine.” He crosses his legs at he knee, swinging his right foot; he looks like a young lion in repose. “You could come to one of my lectures, y’know. They’re Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten. I dunno, do you do that? Observe your specimens in their natural habitat? I’ll buy you lunch afterwards, if you want. Seems only fair.”

Ray does not ‘do that’. His heart is straining against the confines of his ribcage and hurling itself against the walls in an attempt to escape.

“I have a number of appointments on Thursdays,” he says. “But Tuesday would be quite nice.”

This grin is genuine. “All right.”

“Where on the campus are they held?” Ray asks, pen poised and ready.

“Give it here,” Edward says, motioning for the pad of paper. “I’ll draw you a map.”

 

 

On Monday night, he dreams of holding a shadow in his arms—and then the shadow is a young man cut out of darkness and solidifying into warmth. It’s this Edward, the new Edward—his sharp yellow eyes and smooth silver arm, but with the short, feathery hair that belonged to the boy.

“Who was my favorite poet?” Edward asks.

“Keats, I think,” Ray says. “I’m not quite sure, to be honest. You were more interested in the periodic table than in pentameter.”

“At least I got that right,” Edward says, nestling closer, skimming the cold metal fingers up Ray’s bare side. “Was I interested in you?”

“You were so young,” Ray says, leaning in to bury his face in Edward’s soft hair. “I don’t know.”

“Must’ve been,” Edward says, and there’s something… rising… from his hair—a mist; a faint golden-brown miasma— “Must be.”

“Mustard,” Ray says blankly. “Mustard gas.”

“Sorry,” Edward says as the blisters blossom across Ray’s skin.

 

 

Edward’s map turns out to be spectacularly unhelpful, but with a combination of intuition and inquiry, Ray manages to find his way to the appropriate auditorium with a few minutes to spare.

He sits in the back corner of the top row and settles just in time for Edward to blast in like an avenging whirlwind, loose papers scattering in his wake. He’s brighter, cheerier, livelier than Ray expected—he looks like he wants to be here; like he’s _enjoying_ it. He greets several of the students in the front rows familiarly, leaning on their desks, before he tosses his satchel onto the podium, saunters up to the blackboard, and rolls up his left sleeve. He smiles at the chalk for a moment as he rolls it between the pad of his thumb and the first finger of his bare left hand, and then he launches into a lecture so enthused it’s almost an assault on the senses.

Ray doesn’t know enough about advanced chemistry to follow the equations or their explanations, but he knows enough about _people_ to be enraptured by Edward’s voice and movement and body language.

A tall, slender figure slides into the seat beside his. Ray glances over, and it’s Al—the brother.

“He’s really something, isn’t he?” Al says without taking his eyes off of the heedless explosion of energy at the chalkboard.

“He is,” Ray says slowly.

“How much did he tell you?” Al asks, resting his chin on the heel of one hand.

“More than I thought I could believe,” Ray says.

Al smiles at that. “He trusts you.”

“I find myself trusting him, too,” Ray says. “It’s…”

Al flicks back a drifting lock of his own hair. “Uncanny?”

“Unprecedented,” Ray says. “I’m not in the habit of believing everything I hear.”

“How much have you told him?” Al asks.

That’s an odd turn for the interrogation to take. “I beg your pardon?”

“About yourself,” Al says. “The hard truths, the secrets, the buried things. He’ll retch up his guts for you, but if you don’t give back, he’ll think you’re not interested. It’s…” He smiles again, all enigma this time. “An exchange.”

Ray watches Edward scraping numbers out across the chalkboard—swift, deft slashes of white. “I see.”

“Did he tell you about Roy?” Al asks.

“He mentioned him,” Ray says. “Relatively often, usually in reference to a manner in which I was different from him.”

“That’s good,” Al says. He purses his lips and taps a finger on his chin. “Well, I _think_ it’s good. What do you think?”

“I think I will never be in danger of conflating him with the Edward that I knew,” Ray says. “I’m not yet sure he’ll feel the same about me.”

“You’re quick, Doctor,” Al says, knitting both hands under his chin this time. “I’m not sure, myself. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Ray has never been fond of waiting—but the slow unfurling of a human mind, and a human heart? _That_ he lives for.

 

 

With the lecture concluded, Edward shoos the students out the door—pausing, of course, to answer several questions in enthusiastic detail, with a few wild gesticulations for good measure—and then races up the aisle to Ray’s and Al’s little roost.

“Hey, kid,” he says to Al, touching the boy’s shoulder, and only after they’ve shared a smile does he turn a blinding grin on Ray. “You showed up.”

Ray imagines the litany of lies and failures that must have bred that mistrust. “I did,” he says. “And I’m very glad. For all of your mixed feelings on the matter, I think you’re quite suited to teaching.”

“Yeah, well,” Edward says, ducking too late to hide the rush of pink to his cheeks. “I’m starving, c’mon. Al, what do you want for lunch?”

Ed commences galumphing, and Al casts Ray an amused look _much_ too old for his face before moving sedately after. “I was thinking we should go to the place that does the sandwiches.”

 

 

And it’s curious, Ray thinks, because the pair of brothers has such a strange symbiosis—the longer they’re together, the more they open _outward_. But he sorts through the data, as he _ooh_ s and _aah_ s at the travel stories, laughs genuinely at the shenanigans, tries not to get too trapped in Edward’s gold ore eyes—and he remembers that their parents were both gone when they were children. This, the solidarity, the synchronicity, is the most reliable thing they’ve ever had. The closer they are, the more inclusive they can be, because it’s not just that they make each other comfortable: they make each other _safe_. They are one another’s home.

He hardly notices the food, which must mean it’s at least not _bad_ , though his standards, in a post-trench-rations life, are not what once they were.  It’s difficult to pay attention to much of anything but the way that Edward is grinning at him—so warmly and so intently, like this small wrought-iron bistro chair between two boys from another universe is where he _belongs_.

Perhaps it’s mad, but he’s almost starting to believe it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this crappy thing! ♥

“I was at a masquerade,” Kain says.  “But I was the only one who didn’t have a mask—I can’t remember if I’d lost it, or if I’d never had one, but whatever the reason was, I felt embarrassed about it.  And there were so many _people_ ; it was this great, pulsing crowd of… and then I saw that things were—missing.  Pieces of me were missing.  They were just—vanishing.  First it was my fingers, on the left hand—” He raises it; wriggles them.  “And then there was this chunk out of my arm—” He draws an invisible line on his bicep with a fingertip.  “And then my ear, and I was trying to cover that with my disappearing hand—I was so _humiliated_ , and I kept asking people, ‘Where am I?  Where am I?’, and they just said ‘You’re right here, what do you mean?’”

Ray wants to hug him, or at least to pat his head.  It’s strange—Kain and Edward are about the same height, and not _so_ different in build, but Edward fills the whole chair, whereas Kain looks… small.  “How did that feel?”

“I was angry at first,” Kain says, twisting his hands together now.  “They weren’t even _trying_ to understand; they weren’t even _looking_ at me.  But then I was… sad.  Because if they _couldn’t_ understand, then… I was alone.  They wouldn’t be able to see me if they tried.  And that was worse, I think, because it was no one’s fault.  There was no one to blame.  And that meant there was nothing I could do.”

“How does _that_ feel?” Ray asks.

Kain smiles wryly.  “Familiar,” he says.

 

 

Heymans raises both hands and spreads his fingers, as if to frame an earth-shattering revelation.

“Corners,” he says.

Ray lets that rest for a moment, presuming that more is forthcoming.

More does not come forth.

“Corners,” he says, expectantly.

“Turning corners,” Heymans says.

“Would you mind elaborating just a tad?” Ray asks.

“Do I have to pay extra for the sass?” Heymans asks.

“I accept tips,” Ray says.

“I’ve just been tensing up an awful hell of a lot lately,” Heymans says.  “And it’s mostly when I’m turning corners—on the street, you know; around a building; what have you.  Because I know—I _know_ , in that deep-dread kind of way, in my _gut_ , and everything goes _cold_ —I _know_ there’s something on the other side.  Or someone.  I just _feel_ it—it’s a fact, every single time. I’d stake my life on it.  And I… I steel myself, and I’m waiting, and my heart starts slamming, and I go to turn the corner, and for a _second_ I’m just so _sure_ there’s someone there that I actually _see_ them, but then I blink, and—”

He drops his hands into his lap.

Ray shifts carefully in his seat.  “Nothing?” he asks.

“Not a thing,” Heymans says.  “And it’s the same with doors, sometimes—I could _swear_ , with this… this _premonitory_ conviction, that when I turn the handle and open the door and walk through, I’ll be coming out into a trench.  I _know_ it.  And my whole body goes haywire with adrenaline; and my head spins; I just… I can _see_ it; I can smell the mud and the sweat and the piss and the smoke for a second—I’m _there_ , in that instant, and then…”

“Nothing,” Ray says softly.

“Not a thing,” Heymans says.

Ray toys with his pen for a moment, watching the dust motes glimmer in the sunlight slanting through the window.

“Perhaps you could try walking a while somewhere _without_ corners,” he says slowly. “A park, perhaps. Kensington Gardens. Somewhere without too many dark places—good visibility; no one sneaking up on you. Establish that as a habit, and try to teach yourself to relax. And then try to teach yourself to return to that when you’re at a crossroads, and you feel the sense of doom closing in—to bring Kensington back, or wherever you choose. Try to teach yourself to remember that they’re both the same.” He crosses his legs. “Do you think?”

Heymans folds his hands, refolds them, disentangles them, and folds them again.

“Kensington’s a bit poncy,” he says.

“I do believe you’re missing the point,” Ray says.

 

 

Friday, ten-twenty-five. He hears the door open downstairs, and the voices drift up.

“Good morning! How’re you?”

“I’m… well. Thank you. And you?”

“Good—great! Just dandy. I know I’m a little early—it’s kinda funny, actually; Al’d have a heart attack if he knew. Anyway… can I go up now, or should I wait for my hour to start? ’S fine by me either way.”

“I… suppose you might as well go up. Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Elric?”

“Huh? Yeah, yeah, I’m sure; I’m just… it’s a nice day; that’s all.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“Well… please, as you like. You’re his first appointment.”

“And he’s probably just standing there dramatically looking out the window?”

The unmistakable amusement in Liza’s voice is a bit of a betrayal, all things considered. “That or pressing his ear to the keyhole to listen to the entirety of this conversation.”

“Oh. Hell. Well, I’ll… just… hope for the best, then, I guess.”

“Certainly.”

“Right.”

Ray is stranded in the middle of the room as footsteps clomp up the stairs. If he can’t stand at the window, and he can’t stand by the door, what in the world is he to do?

He makes a last-second dash for yesterday’s patient charts and attempts to look convincingly busy and preoccupied as Edward waltzes in.

“Hey,” Edward says delightedly, nudging the door shut behind him with his left foot. “I still can’t believe you actually came on Tuesday. I just… I mean, it’s pretty fantastic. And… you’re pretty fantastic.”

Ray manages not to drop the graph of Kain’s heartrate as he turns fully, rather than just sneaking glances in the reflection on the windowpane to the best of his limited ability. Edward is… grinning, lopsidedly; leaning, casually, against the door, with his arms folded across his chest; raising an eyebrow, the amber eye beneath it ever so slightly hazy.

“Anybody ever tell you that?” he asks. “I figure somebody ought to. Might as well be me. Little hint for your next set of Q-and-A—I’ve got a martyr complex like you wouldn’t _believe_.”

“Edward,” Ray says carefully, “are you drunk?”

“ _No_ ,” Edward says, waving the first finger of his left hand. He draws himself up to his full height—such as it is—and strides across to the examination table, onto which he levers himself with impressive dexterity considering the circumstances. “It’s just that I started out real early—I think Al almost had an aneurysm, by the way; maybe you can check ’im over next time you see him—and then I thought I’d get a coffee at that little café a couple doors down, and then I saw they had _Irish_ coffee, and I thought ‘Well, I like Irish tea okay; wonder what their coffee’s like?’, and then it wasn’t until I took a sip that I realized why the waiter’d given me such a funny look.”

Ray sets Kain’s charts down on the countertop. “I… see.”

Edward laughs, and the _shamelessness_ of it is—startling. He looks young, looks _bright_ , looks unembarrassed and unrepentant and alive. The world is so muted now, and Ray’s heart is so mummified, and London is so _gray_ that he can’t help the craving—if he touched this strange and wonderful creature that’s shed its inhibitions, would the colors spread? Would the flowers and the skies open into impossible shades again—no more of these dull, quiet facsimiles of what they were? Would the blast of sunlight flatten out the shadows? Would _feeling_ come back to Ray’s nerves and veins and fingertips? Would it all be worth it, then?

“Don’t tell me you’ve never had whiskey in the morning before,” Edward says.

“Never on _accident_ ,” Ray says.

Edward laughs again, shaking his head; his hair actually _shimmers_ , which is extremely unfair. To make matters worse, he unbuttons his shirt and his waistcoat and shrugs them off so that his whole body undulates, and Ray’s mouth goes very dry.

“Well?” he says. “I wanna get to the talking part. I could do my own reflexes while you take my pulse.”

“An incredible facility for chemistry alone does not qualify you to practice medicine,” Ray says, tentatively approaching exquisite doom, donning the earpieces of the stethoscope as he goes. “Breathe deeply for me.”

“Anything,” Edward says, softly, liltingly, almost inaudible, and then he flinches at the contact of the cold metal disc and obliges.

His lungs sound clear, although Ray would be stunned if the weight of the steel arm isn’t compressing his ribcage as well as his spine. His heartbeat is normal (just _slightly_ quick—but does it quicken more when Ray’s fingertips slip and brush across his skin, or is that merely Ray’s imagination—?); his blood pressure is consistent; his temperature is precisely the same as last time, one degree hot. Perhaps he runs warm. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the ‘automail’. Perhaps it’s Ray’s proximity.

The moment Ray’s made the last mark on the clipboard, Edward bounds up, buttoning his clothes again, and slips past him to go settle in the chair. He beams. Ray feels like a toy on a pull-string as he follows.

“So I was thinking,” Edward says as Ray sits down and clips in a blank page. “I figure I should get to ask you something.”

“That’s not how it works,” Ray says slowly.

“But I’m paying for this session,” Edward says, leaning forward, eyes just— _vast_. “You said it yourself; my money, my time, right? So it ought to be my call what gets said, shouldn’t it?”

“That’s not how it works,” Ray says.

“But part of _your_ job is to get me to trust you,” Edward says. “So that I’ll open up better and give you stuff to work with. Shouldn’t you take every opportunity?”

“That’s not—” Ray can hear Al’s voice in his head, light and faintly musical. _How much have you told him?_ “…well. What are you so desperate to know?”

Edward tilts his head and smiles thinly. “Did you have the hots for him?”

Ray can hear very little over the sound of his own heart beating this time. “For whom?”

“Edward,” says the boy in the chair. “Your Edward. Back then. Did you?”

“No,” Ray says.

Edward’s eyes flicker, light-dark-light.

“He was young,” Ray says. “And our acquaintance was very… structured. Professional. We only ever circled around each other in one context, and it was a space that I built to be safe.” He swallows. Then he swallows again. “My… attraction… to him was… pure, you might say. I was drawn to his intellect and his innocence; he had the most fascinating mind… He was so interested in everything under the sun that it was nearly impossible not to take an interest in _him_.”

“Interest,” Edward says, each syllable dropping like a stone.

“It was during the War,” Ray says, and it’s curiously easy now, staring into Edward’s guarded eyes, making a distinct effort to meet them both at once. “It wasn’t the Edward I’d known; it was the Edward who _might_ be. It was the child growing into something extraordinary, somewhere out there—because I knew he would; I’d catalogued the fine bones and the beginnings of a _magnificent_ adulthood; I’d seen his potential firsthand. It was the Edward I hadn’t met yet that I wanted. It was him I thought of, and dreamt of, and clung to. And nothing stayed pure for long, during the War—not in a trench, or a tent, or a military hospital where you can’t sleep for the screaming.” The sardonic smile is long gone from Edward’s face; it’s paler, now, if Ray’s eye doesn’t deceive him. “I suppose there’s a good chance he was already dead by the time I was living for what he would have been.”

Edward looks so shattered in that moment that Ray regrets offering him exactly what he asked for.

Then he starts to smile—thinly, a smile like a shard of glass tilting into the light.

“The guy I knew,” he says. “Roy. He had that streak in him, too. Vengeful. I always figured it was cruel, y’know, but it’s… I mean, it’s not, is it? It’s defensive. Because you can’t be vulnerable for long; you can’t stand it, can you? ’Cause if you let someone in, you have to push them away again even further, so they stay at a safe distance. ’Cause it’s not safe to let people see you like you really are, but at the same time you’re dying to tell the truth. ’Cause you don’t want to be judged—you can’t handle being judged, because people don’t _get_ it, and they make it worse thinking that they understand—but the only thing worse than the judgment is being alone. So you give ’em a taste and then scare ’em off forever. Don’t you? You lash out so nobody can hurt you as bad as you hurt them. And that way you always win. That way you never have to trust anybody, and you’re always holding all the cards, and eventually they won’t even believe what you told them anymore—so it’s off of your chest, but it’s like you never said anything at all.”

Slowly, he curls his right hand into a fist on the arm of the chair.

“What do you think?” he asks. “Pretty close?”

Ray keeps the pen very loosely suspended between his thumb and his first fingertip. “That’s not how it works.”

“And it’s a test, too, isn’t it?” Edward asks, angling his head so that his ponytail slithers over his shoulder and ripples down his back.  “If somebody actually _can_ swallow all the bitter shit that’s buried down inside you, then maybe they’re worth keeping around.”

Ray could say a lot of things—could snap a lot of comebacks; could spew a lot of vitriol; could give back better than he’s had here.  Edward’s young, and _decent_ , underneath his air of jadedness, behind the grand show of counterfeit misanthropy.  He’s still _good_ , below it all. He doesn’t know how to hurt people yet. He wouldn’t enjoy it even if he did.

“Are you speaking from experience?” he asks. “You seem to have a tendency to shoulder the lion’s share of the blame, and we’ve established a sense of abandonment—that is, a fear in you that it’s always imminent, because that possibility has become a reality so many times before. Do you try to drive people away because you don’t believe you’re worthy of their attention? Or perhaps because you think that once they see you as you _really_ are—once they see you as you see yourself—they’ll realize they’d been wasting their time all along, and they’ll resent you for it in addition to the disdain?”

“I deserved that,” Edward says, and his smile wobbles but doesn’t fade.  “Coming onto your turf and trying to beat you at your game.  S’only fair.  Jesus, I’m too tipsy for this.”

That sounds like the kind of almost-apology Ray might make.  He draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly.  Edward’s right, isn’t he?  About all of it.  But that’s _fine_ , for them to see through each other; it’s _fine_ that Edward can part the curtains, pierce the veils, stab straight through the breastplate to the heart of him—that’s _brilliant_ , really.  That’s rare.  He’s not afraid.  He drilled down to the pitch-black dreck in Ray’s soul, and he hasn’t backed away.

“Would you like some water?” Ray asks. Edward shakes his head, looking at the window.

Isn’t this always how it goes? There’s a critical distance between two human beings—a necessary gap, a breath of grace; affinity depends on that separation staying intact. When people start to merge, they conflict. When you come too close to the essence of another person, your core identity and theirs are necessarily at war.

At War.

It tastes like dried blood on the back of Ray’s tongue, but it’s his fault for rising to the bait. He should have known better. He should have known better from the beginning, from the glimpse of gold on the sidewalk, from the sudden and uncharacteristic dearth of rain. The very sky is toying with him now. He can’t have this. It could never have been kind.

“I think perhaps we should talk about those feelings of unworthiness,” Ray says. “They motivate you very powerfully, but they’re really quite unfounded.”

Edward glances at him, eyes wide, and blinks. “What?”

“Let’s apply logic,” Ray says. “You’ve done your share of leaving people, haven’t you? What were your intentions towards the people that you left behind?”

“I was protecting them,” Edward says instantly, and the way his face twitches—the way his eyes narrow—the sheer intensity with which he searches Ray’s face for meaning— “I was trying to save them, because I knew—or I was just trying to keep them out of the worst of it, or—what are you trying to say?”

“You didn’t leave them because they weren’t worthy of your staying,” Ray says. “You did it for reasons unrelated to your relationships—or, often, because your leaving was the nobler thing to do, and the better thing for them, inasmuch as you were able to perceive.” He watches the shifting planes of Edward’s face; emotions move so _fast_ across it trying to keep up with that absolutely formidable brain. “Why wouldn’t the same be true for you?”

Edward swallows, licks his lips ( _God_ —although perhaps that’s the wrong interjection; Ray’s thoughts are _far_ from godly), and tugs at the end of his ponytail with his left hand.

“It’s different,” he says. “The times when… it’s a case-by-case thing, and it’s always been _different_ , when it’s me leaving or me staying or… I mean, it changes. For a lot of people, putting me in the past is the nobler thing. For them, y’know. It’s better for them. Al should’ve, really; I didn’t want him to get stuck in this shithole with me, but he just… followed.”

“Well, let’s examine that,” Ray says. “Am I correct in understanding that Al is your favorite person in this world or any world?”

“Duh,” Edward says, with no little amount of panache.

“Ergo,” Ray says, “his opinion is sound, and of considerable value, no?”

“Yeah,” Edward says, frowning now as he tries to keep ahead.

“Er _go_ ,” Ray says, “for him to _choose_ to stay with you, regardless of the consequences, regardless of what he may have given up to do so, was a wise and commendable decision. Choosing you was right.”

“But—” Edward says. He hesitates. “That can’t be—” He scrubs the knuckles of his left hand at his eyes. “Mustang—”

“Could you call me Raymond?” Ray asks—and promptly despises himself, hates his weakness, abhors the sheer _unprofessionalism_ besides—because who gives the slightest damn if Edward _recognizes_ him as an entity separate from the figure in his past? It’s no one’s business but Edward’s, and that stranger’s; Ray has no prerogative whatsoever to go tromping through Edward’s past trying to rewrite his future; his only purpose here is to disentangle the Gordian knot of threads for _Edward’s_ benefit; for him to profit is selfish, is practically sinful—

“Sure,” Edward says. “Raymond. Ray. Can I call you Ray?”

 _Please don’t,_ Ray thinks. _We’re both undetonated mines, I think, and if we touch one another the wrong way—_

“Certainly,” he says.

“Ray, then.” Edward fiddles with the top button of his waistcoat. “You really think that? What you just said—do you believe that, or are you just saying it because you’re supposed to talk the crazy people down from the ledges?”

“None of my patients are ‘crazy’,” Ray says. “And I believe it.”

Edward drops his hand, and his fingertips skate back and forth over the arm of the chair instead. “I feel crazy,” he says. “Less often now than I used to—before Al was here, it was just… well, there was Hohenheim, at first, but after he up and vanished in typical piece-of-shit-excuse-for-a-dad style, it was just… all I had to go on was the clarity of the memories, y’know? Everything around me pointed to me making it all up. Delusions. And they say that happens, y’know; a lot of the time it seems like people who are really smart can’t quite… contain it. Like when there’s too _much_ in your head, it sort of starts collapsing on itself, and you get crushed under the weight, or lost in the maze, or… I dunno, it just kind of eats at you. Some mornings I’d get up in Munich and look around at all of these real people and think, _This is the real part, and what_ I _knew is a dream I developed to give myself some significance_. It would’ve been a bad dream, yeah, but there were good things about it, and…” He lets his head fall back and sighs, smiling slightly. “And thank fuck for Al.”

“Tell me about Al,” Ray says.

“He’s perfect,” Edward says.

Ray waits.

Edward raises his eyebrows and adds nothing.

“Can you tell me,” Ray says slowly, “why he seems so much older than he looks?”

Edward smiles. “You’re gonna take back that ‘no patients are crazy’ thing.”

“Try me,” Ray says.

“I died,” Edward says. “That was—the second time, I guess, since… I died here, as your Ed, and then fell back into _me_ , and… and then I got impaled and shit, and I died. Al had—it’s hard to explain; he had _power_ , right at that second, so he brought me back, but he used himself up doing it, so I… returned the favor. And I ended up here. And it turns out I’d erased the last few years of him, when I did that—so he came back as the kid he’d been before he and I fucked up the first time; and then he lived through a couple years alone, while I was here; and then when he followed me over, he remembered all the shit from that interim period that he’d lost. So he’s really—he’s _older_ than he would’ve been, but he lived some of the same years twice, and… honestly, he’s always been kind of older than he ought to be anyway, so it’s… complicated. He’s not just some kid. That’s the important thing.”

“I never would have made that mistake,” Ray says, and Edward beams.

The grin doesn’t last long, though, and Ray mourns its passing.

“You ever had somebody like that?” Edward asks, tentatively. “Somebody you’d… kill for. Not because you want to, or because it’s _ever_ easy, or… but just because you know, objectively, that they’re the best person in the world, so whatever you had to do for them, you just… would?”

Ray has killed for a flag. He’s killed to survive. He’s killed on accident—or contributed to a death already in motion, to paint himself more charitably. He’s killed so that comrades could live, but it was all perfunctory. It was a task the day required, if one intended to outlast the sunlight. It was as ordinary as the mud and the damp and the hollowness everywhere in other men’s eyes.

Has he ever found someone he’d kill for in the _streets_ , not the trenches?

It’s possible.

“Anyway,” Edward says, “now that Al’s here, at least I know I’m real. That makes a big fuckin’ difference, y’know—being sure that your entire worldview is actually based on something concrete. I mean, Jesus, you must know about that—how fucked up it is to be isolated in some other place, thinking about a whole universe of _people_ going on without you, just puttering around their daily lives like nothing’s changed—like you’re not jumping from one crisis to another.”

“It’s interesting that you say ‘jumping’,” Ray says. “Jumping is active. Jumping requires initiative, and agency.”

“As opposed to what?” Edward asks.

“Falling,” Ray says.

“I’m half made of metal,” Edward says, smile twisting into a smirk. “I try to avoid that as much as possible.” He stretches both arms over his head; his back arches; Ray’s throat goes dry. “I make it a rule to jump first when I feel my balance starting to go.”

“Does that help?” Ray asks. “It ends the same way, doesn’t it?”

“Win some, lose some,” Edward says. “But if you always go down fighting, at least nobody can ever say you didn’t give it your fucking all.”

Ray doesn’t know that he remembers the last time he had all of himself to give.

“Tell me about one of the times you won,” he says.

“Shit,” Edward says, grinning wryly. “That’s a much shorter list.”

That Ray can identify with.

 

 

He dreams, that night, of a dark room with a steel table, and a partly-steel boy. The fierce yellow eyes are watching him critically as he cuts deep into Edward’s chest with a scalpel that won’t stop gleaming.

“Keep going,” Edward says. “No guts, no glory, right?”

“That’s a bit crass,” Ray says. He presses deeper, and deeper still; the blood wells, and pools, and spills down in little rivers over Edward’s ribs.

“Come _on_ ,” Edward says. “Hurry it up, would you? Hurts like hell.”

Ray can feel sweat beading on his forehead. He tries to swipe it aside with his sleeve, but the eyepatch feels massively bulky, and it persists in getting in the way. “Are you speaking from experience?”

“About hell?” Edward says. “Sure, yeah. Been there a couple times. But so’ve you.”

“Touché,” Ray says.

“I like to think of our demons sitting side-by-side,” Edward says. “On a fence, maybe. Like cats. With their tails all twined together.”

“That’s sweet,” Ray says. “I… think.”

“Will you stop pussyfooting and _cut_ me?” Edward asks.

Ray can’t stop looking at the gushing wound; his hand is soaked, the blade is drowning. “I don’t want to hurt y—”

“Too late,” Edward says. “Life’s just the shit between now and the end, Mustang. No one ever got anywhere half-assing it.”

He holds his breath and digs the scalpel in like a carving knife.

“Come on,” Edward says, and there are tiny bubbles of blood on his lips now, but he’s _grinning_ again— “Hurry up, c’mon, there’re a ton of layers—”

And there are—cotton padding and tinfoil and gauze and skin and velvet; Ray peels them back one at a time, and still the tide of red swells, and the iron clings to his throat and burrows in his lungs.

Beneath a dozen, maybe more… a heart of steel, beating just a bit too fast. The workings are beautifully intricate. It’s cold in Ray’s cupped hands as he lifts it out of Edward’s chest.

Edward snickers at his expression. “Well, what the hell did you expect?”

 

 

Tuesday dawns gray with spitting rain. Ray turns up his collar and makes the trek to University College London.

The stairs upwards out of the station at Euston are _cascading_ with water, and the pavement’s riddled with puddles; he’s soaked through and miserable by the time he slogs into the lecture hall. He’s also several minutes late, and takes care not to let the door slam—not that any of the students seem capable of taking their eyes off of Edward if they wanted to.

Ray settles in the back row and lays his very wet hat across his knees, trying not to drip too loudly. A young woman a few seats over glances at him, stares openly at his eyepatch for a long moment, and then hastily ducks to her notes again, flushing to the roots of her hair. Ray can’t decide whether it’s tragic or a tremendous relief that he’s grown so accustomed to the gawking that it doesn’t even sting anymore. The strangeness is distant now—the bizarre concept of a generation too young to know the horror closely; a mass of children swanning towards adulthood, gazing slack-jawed at the amputees and empty spaces, _wondering_ instead of _knowing_.

Is that part of Edward’s appeal, in the end? He, too, has pieces missing; he hides them, but there’s a sort of peace to his acceptance that Ray can’t help but admire.

He’s in fine form this morning, as it turns out—the chalk lines spill out across the blackboard; he moves in graceful sweeps of brown and white, with the stark gold hair swinging like pendulum.

Al doesn’t arrive to commence talking sense, but the girl off to the right may be almost as mesmerized with the charming young professor as Ray himself. As the minutiae of the chemistry wash over him—as his toes curl with the cold, and freezing water drips slowly from his hair down the collar of his shirt—he can’t quite stop himself from thinking of the questions he’d ask if Edward weren’t paying for psychiatry, and the world was a bit more fair.

_How many people have you slept with?_

_How many_ men _?_

 _Did they kiss you? Did they tug your hair until you whimpered, or did they stroke it back and gasp into your ear? Did they mind all the metal? Did they draw their fingers slowly down your spine and wince and murmur softly and press their lips to every vertebra? Did they hold you, after, and ask you how you felt? Did they draw you to the kitchen after, or before, or both—for tea, for chocolate, to push you up against the cabinets and lick your throat? Did they overwhelm you ’til your knees gave way and lift you up to keep you going? Did they show you just how good it can be, with the right person, with the pent-up desperation, with so many stifled screams, so many gestures halted out in public, so much_ wanting _saved up for the rooms with candles and the quiet dark?_

_Did they prove your beauty to you with the worship of their hands and mouths?_

_Shall I?_

Surely it’s not his imagination that when Edward looks up and sees him huddled there, at the back of the room, the smile is one of equal parts delight and _desire_.

Surely the loneliness hasn’t blinded his one remaining eye.

Surely there’s something left on Earth for men who crawled back from the crevices of Hell.

 

 

“Let me get you a coffee,” Edward says, reaching for Ray’s elbow, stopping short. “It’s fucking lousy out there, but there’s a place that’s close—and I’m pretty sure we’re saturated, so it’s not like we can get _wetter_.”

As they approach the door, Ray dons his hat again. It squishes in a rather alarming way. “You say that like it won’t be incredibly unpleasant all the same.”

“I’ll get you two coffees,” Edward says. “Or three. Or however many it takes for the caffeine to make you forget how shitty it is to be this cold.”

“Speaking of which,” Ray says, “is your arm all right? Didn’t you say it doesn’t fare as well in adverse weather?”

Edward’s shock softens into surprise and then melts into an odd sort of sweetness. “It’s—okay. I’m gonna have to put a hot water bottle on it later; it’s a little sore, but… I… can’t believe you remembered that.”

“Has no one told you that you’re unforgettable?” Ray says.

But he’s a born coward, of course, and he steps out into the rain before Edward can reply.

 

 

Friday. Ten twenty-eight. The door downstairs opens; creaks; closes again.

“Good morning,” Edward says.

“Good morning,” Liza says, in a tone with just the _faintest_ hint of ‘How nice that you’re not drunk this week.’ “How are you?”

“Bit damp,” Edward says. “You?”

“Fine, thank you,” Liza says. “Let me walk you up.”

Ray makes a concerted effort to review the extremely unhelpful scribbles he made during last week’s disastrous hour. There appears to be a scrawl that actually says _Help me_ , though he’s not sure who exactly he meant to implore.

Liza knocks and pushes the door in the same motion. The woman is a brilliant multitasker.

“Doctor,” she says, “I was going to make a quick trip to the bank. Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

Beneath the coding of civility, that means she won’t come back before a full hour has elapsed. This is _permission_. Good God, how does she always _know_ —?

“Right,” Ray says around his heart, which has leapt up into his esophagus and started pounding. “Thank you.”

Liza nods, raises one eyebrow in a manner that strongly suggests _Do me a favor and try not to be too stupid altogether, won’t you?_ , and steps aside to let Edward enter.

Edward stands in the doorway, assiduously not making eye contact, until Liza’s brisk footsteps have proceeded down the stairs and out the front door. Only then does he clear his throat and fidget with the bottom hem of the right sleeve of his overcoat, which is indeed rather damp from the ongoing drizzle.

“About—last week,” he says. “I mean to tell you Tuesday, but I was too chickenshit; I just… we were having a nice time, and it’s _different_ not being in here, and… I’m sorry. I should’ve turned around and gone home once I realized how I was gonna be. I’ve been like that before, to people; I’ve resorted to fucking liquor before to work up the nerve to be _myself_ on this stupid planet—not that it’s _stupid_ -stupid; just… wrong. For me. Anyway, I’ve—I should’ve known better than to come in here like that, and it was shitty of me to do that to you. And then I was predictably an asshole to you the whole time. And I’m sorry.”

“I ought to have handled it better, myself,” Ray says. “It’s really all right.”

Edward stares at him. “It’s… really… not, though; I feel terrible; I should’ve—”

“People make mistakes,” Ray says. “Perhaps you made one, but I made several more in reaction, which was rather asinine of me, all things considered—it’s not as though I’ve never been in your place.”

Edward is beginning to look confused. “Wait, but—you aren’t supposed to apologize; _I’m_ the one who fucked up. I mean, Al was saying how the only manly—okay, he said ‘adult’, but—the only thing to do was to come in and pay my hour and apologize and then leave if you wanted, and you…”

Now the confusion has taken on shades of genuine distress. It feels like Ray’s heart is being run through a clothes wringer very, very slowly. He sets his clipboard down and approaches, expecting the tension in Edward’s shoulders to make their owner snap and bolt like… well, like an animal. Is that another of the parts of him that’s so intoxicating? He goes from predatory aggression and searing intellect to utter abjection like a light going out; a flick of a switch sends him catapulting back. He’s brazen and dynamic and absolutely unpredictable, and every shred of feeling in him spreads through his body to the tips of his fingers and _consumes_ him.

He’s just so unrepentantly _alive_ that Ray can’t… stop… craving.

“It’s really all right,” he says, helpless against all of it—thrown, defeated, _lost_. “I hardly conducted myself in what I would call an exemplary fashion.”

“Jesus,” Edward says, rubbing the back of his left hand across his forehead, smearing the rain dripping from his hairline across his face. “You’re so fucking _British_.”

“I’m sorry?” Ray attempts, edging closer.

Edward shakes his head, and drops of water fly from the end of his ponytail. He winces. “Shit, have you got—I dunno, a towel or—”

Ray reaches out and thumbs a trail of water from Edward’s cheek.

Unpredictable: Edward’s eyes don’t flare with excitement or smolder with contempt. Instead they’re… _tired_.

“Fuck you,” he says quietly, and his left hand rises to clutch at Ray’s sleeve; it curls around his wrist and tightens. “Do you _mean_ it? I don’t fucking have time for you not to mean it; I’ve been burned so many fucking…”

Gently, gently, Ray guides his hair back behind his ears, cups both hands around his jaw, and leans down to kiss him.

Edward makes a soft sound a bit like choking, a bit like sobbing, but as Ray draws back in terror, two gloved hands fist in his collar and drag him back, and Edward bites down hard on his bottom lip.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Edward mumbles against his mouth, eyelashes flicking against his cheek, as they stagger backwards, clinging to each other, and Ray manages to release his grip of Edward’s coat just in time to brace them before they crash into the examination table. “Just don’t _fuck_ with me, all right? ’Cause I’ll end you; I _will_ ; I can’t take any more of that shit, and I get to a point where I _lose_ it, and one more push, Mustang— _Ray_ —one more fucking push is all it’d take, and—”

“I won’t,” Ray says. Edward is the center of the universe—a constellation of wonder; the summation of light. His skin is beautiful; his bones are beautiful; his jaw, his ears, his hair, the darkened crescents underneath his eyes— “I won’t hurt you. I promise. I won’t.”

“The guy I knew—” A gasp leaps from Edward’s throat and shudders past Ray’s neck. “The—other—you—he was a fucking _liar_ —”

Ray kisses him, hard; pulls back breathless. “Have I—ever been—anything but honest with you?”

“No, but—”

“Trust me,” Ray whispers.

“But—”

“ _Please_.”

“Fuck.” Edward rises up against him, twines both hands in Ray’s hair, gazes at him unblinking, lets go, and vaults up onto the exam table, reaching out. “Come on, oh, _God_ —”

He spreads his legs as Ray follows, and they cinch in tight around Ray’s waist when he’s close, pulling him closer, fixing him there with Edward’s hands sliding up his shirtfront, Edward’s breath coming short against his mouth, Edward’s eyes so damned _warm_ and so damned _desperate_ —

It’s been a long time since Ray found a human being’s body so magnetic. He rakes Edward’s hair back with his fingers, drags them down the boy’s neck, slips his thumbs under the wet shirt collar in search of the sharp bones. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Ha,” Edward breathes, twisting in past Ray’s elbow to nip at his throat, and _Lord_ — “Not for long.”

Edward’s heel scrapes slowly up the back of Ray’s thigh, and the winds can have caution forever.

It’s a heedless tangle after that—of pushing Edward’s coat off of his shoulders and kissing them both; of the way he squirms out of the shirt and the waistcoat. It’s the startlingly loud _clang_ of his belt buckle against the table’s edge; it’s the draft against Ray’s bare back as Edward’s warm hand and cold hand trace in tandem down the little scars and clothing creases on his chest.

For three weeks Ray has been yearning to run his palms over Edward’s ribs, down his waist, over his hips, to catch up two hands full of his _torturously_ lovely ass and haul him in so that their groins meet almost _too_ hard, and they both cringe and then groan.

“Are you sure?” Ray murmurs into his ear, his hair, his temple.

“Fucking fuck me,” Edward says through clenched teeth, and he stutters out a laugh at the way Ray’s spine goes rigid.

It takes Ray a long moment to accumulate enough saliva to speak. “Have you done this before?”

“Couple times.” Edward’s legs hook tighter around him, grinding their bodies together again; purgatorial heaven. “With—well. Couple times. But never for long, and it never… it didn’t _mean_ …” His fingertips sift through the hair at the nape of Ray’s neck, and he tucks his face into Ray’s neck—nestling into the wrinkled collar of his shirt, which dangles from his shoulder, halfway shucked-off before they both lost the patience to finish the job. “It didn’t mean as much to them as it did to me,” Edward says, lips grazing Ray’s collarbone as they form the words. “For me, it’s… being—naked, being—unprotected, especially in _this_ world, where I don’t have many friends, and I don’t have any weapons, and I just… it doesn’t come natural, is all. It doesn’t come easy. I don’t give it away. I _want_ to; I wanna be open and free and fucking carnal or whatever, but I just—I’m not. I’m scared. I’m vulnerable. And if I lay myself out for somebody, it’s because I’m hoping that they’ll do the fucking same; they’ll _give_ the fucking same; they’ll _surrender_ something, because _God_ , I’m handing them everything I’ve got, you know? And most of the time they just… drop it. Forget it. Throw it away. I’m just another body they wanted for a while.”

“You’re not,” Ray says. There are goosebumps down Edward’s left arm; he chafes his palm over them to try to warm it. “You are not ordinary, and you are not dispensable, and I have dreamt of nothing but you since I first saw you in the street.” He can’t even hope to see Edward’s face with his limited vision—it’s all he can do to find the boy’s hair smooth it down his back. “I can assure you that you’re in no danger from me.”

“I fucking hate you,” Edward says unhappily, which is jarring to say the least. “You’ve got all of his suaveness and gorgeousness and mystique and checkered past and shit, but instead of the arrogant bastard thing, you’re so fucking _sweet_ I know I don’t deserve you, and it fucking kills me, because I can’t jump into this shit knowing it won’t be _fair_ —”

“Don’t jump, then,” Ray says, tugging at the impossible hair gently until Edward raises his face enough for Ray to meet his eyes. “Fall.”

Edward’s eyes are shining, and his grin quavers even as it lights his whole face. “That’s exactly what I fucking mean.”

“I don’t see what ‘fair’ has to do with it,” Ray says.

“It’s complicated,” Edward says.

“I rather like complicated,” Ray says.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Edward says, and kisses him, fisting both hands in Ray’s hair again.

He remembers, dazedly, that they only have an hour—but it feels like his heart is beating extremely fast, and time is moving extremely slow.

He’s already fantasizing about nesting into the good duvet, with Edward’s hair flung back across the white down pillows—or the settee in the living room; Edward splayed out over crushed crimson velvet and gold braid—or the kitchen, with raspberries and melted chocolate and Edward hiked up onto the counter, grinning with a dollop of whipping cream on the tip of his nose—or the wonderful bathtub with the clawed feet that his mother kept in her basement for the duration of the War in case the whole house went down, as if his favorite piece of furniture could act as insurance to bring him back. It’s been a long while since he _wanted_ to bring someone inside his home. It’s been a long while since he wanted to share the last few private pieces of himself.

For the moment, though, this cramped, clinical office will be more than sufficient, with the two of them warming it from end to end—especially when Edward makes a faint keening noise that instantly _ignites_ Ray’s nerves down to the fingertips. Rarely has he been so glad to have a jar of Vaseline in the cabinet, although his hands are shaking so violently that he struggles to twist it open, and Edward starts to laugh, pries it out of his grip, and pops the cap off with his metal hand.

“Are _you_ sure?” he asks, with that grin that’s a challenge and a come-on and _incapacitating_.

“Forgive me,” Ray says. “It’s been… quite some time… since…”

Edward’s legs enfold him again, boots kicked off now, heels pressing gently into the small of Ray’s back. Edward bites his lip on a thin and bewildered smile. “What? You’re full of shit. I don’t believe you.”

“No?” Ray asks, dragging his hands down Edward’s sides to grasp the fabric of his trousers and draw it down, down—he can barely hear, can hardly _see_ through the intensity of his own heartbeat— “It’s the truth. It’s as you said; it’s so rarely worth the risk.”

Edward is chewing on his lip now; Ray’s rather jealous. “But this is?”

“You are,” Ray says.

Edward’s cheeks darken, and Ray kisses him again, and his trousers crumple to the floor at Ray’s feet, and this—this is too good to last; too good to process; almost too good to _bear_ —

Edward slings his arms around Ray’s neck and scoots forward to the edge of the table, and his grin is nervous but so terribly warm.

“Whatcha waiting for?” he asks.

“To wake up, I think,” Ray says, and drags him closer still, aligning their chests, sealing their mouths as he delves his fingers into the jar.

“S’funny,” Edward murmurs into his mouth, tilting his hips up. “’Cause now we’re sleeping tog… _ah_.” He grits his teeth as Ray presses the tip of his finger in gently; Ray’s blood is already racing in response to the tightness and the heat. “Can you— _hnh_ —just—faster—”

“Look at me?” Ray says softly, and the fiery eyes latch onto his face, and he trails his free hand along the narrow waist to wrap it around Edward’s cock.

Distraction is, of course, a much more reliable strategy than merely quickening the pace. With Edward hissing through his teeth with pleasure and preoccupation, it is significantly easier for Ray to push his finger deeper, and then deeper still—to slide in a second, pumping harder at Edward’s cock, kissing him to drink down the hitching breaths and little whimpers—

If there’s one thing Ray does not regret about his profession, it’s the knowledge of anatomy.

“ _Ahh_ —” Edward wriggles from the core of his body outward, like a localized earthquake, like a shiver starting in the _soul_. “Th-there, f-f-fuck—”

And it’s a bit strange, really, that this isn’t _close_ enough—ordinarily Ray is no real proponent of physical contact; handshakes are unimpressive, and hugs are unnecessary, and it’s slightly unnerving to bump into another person on the street. Of course he’s been drawn to the sheer heat of sex before, with moth-to-flame instinct, like a weary refugee to sanctuary—but not like this. Not like a madness; not like a sickness; not like a compulsion.

“ _Fuck_.” Edward’s left hand curls around Ray’s shoulder and tightens until the boy’s arm trembles; the right is an impossibly dense metal fist indenting the cushion on the table. “C’mon, I’m ready, just— _just_ —”

“Oh, God,” Ray whispers.

He withdraws his wet hand, grips Edward’s thigh with it instead, drags them in against each other, fumbles between them to make them _fit_ —

And Edward was wrong, really, because there’s no ‘just’ about it. It is not ‘just’ anything.

It is absolutely fucking perfect.

Ray does not believe in fate, or luck, or destiny, in any conventional sense. At the moment, however, he believes in the sort of serendipity that makes two people line up and match together like they were carved in complement.

And that’s odd, too, because they only ever had an hour, and they only ever needed this moment—to be _sure_ , of all of it. To become, in this split-second, undeniable.

Ray hasn’t counted very many beneficent stars in his lifetime, but he’ll thank the whole cosmos tonight.

“Ray,” Edward pants against his throat, both arms snaking around him now, one freezing, one radiating warmth. “ _Mmm_ —s’all right? You’re— _fuck_ —”

“So much more than all right,” Ray says, and he proves it.

Neither of them holds out especially long, and neither of them seems to care. Ray climbs up onto the exam table to collapse next to Edward, the better for them to tangle all available limbs around one another while they both catch their breath.

“Wonder where my clothes went,” Edward says. He doesn’t sound particularly perturbed.

“Are you cold?” Ray asks, shifting in an attempt to cover more surface area of Edward’s skin despite the fact that his own arm hasn’t changed in size, rendering that endeavor entirely unfeasible.

“Guess so,” Edward says. “Huh.”

“Huh,” Ray says. The syllable feels odd but far from unpleasant on his tongue. “If you’re taking votes, mine is that you never wear trousers again.”

Edward grins. “Uh _huh_.”

Ray shifts up onto his side, wedging his elbow beneath him, and guides wayward strands of hair off of Edward’s forehead. “Do you have any plans this weekend?”

“Dunno,” Edward says. “Probably not. Don’t have any friends. Why?”

“I want to take you to the theater,” Ray says. “Perhaps that should wait for next week, if the United Kingdom persists in producing rainstorms of Biblical proportions. I’d very much like to have you and your brother by for tea. Or Sunday dinner, although I haven’t actually cooked properly in so long I might burn the place down before you even arrive.”

Edward blinks up at him and then, slowly, begins to smile.

“You’re for real about this,” he says.

“For what little it’s worth,” Ray says. He trails his finger along the curved edge of the metal shoulder. Impossible things, apparently, make the best pursuits.

Perhaps it’s too soon, and he wishes he could say otherwise, but he’d go to France again for days like this—for one more writhe of Edward’s incredible body against his; for one more hour choking on each other’s kisses; for one more gasping moan followed up with giddy laughter.

“It’s worth a lot,” Edward says softly. The smile becomes a grin, and the grin becomes a beacon. “Shit, Ray Mustang. You’re for _real_.”


End file.
